In the urban jungle

Hung Ky pagoda is a unique heritage of Hanoi, says Thanh Thu
For decades, the two iron doors at the front of Hung Ky pagoda on Hanoi’s Minh Khai street have been wrapped in chains. All around the growing urban jungle has encroached on the site. There are townhouses, shops, salons, a market and a university in the vicinity, though once, the road leading to the pagoda was flanked by trees, bushes and ponds. Visitors today have to toddle around the back and enter the pagoda by a side door.
Out front swathes of students and labourers sit by any number of food stalls, where lottery tickets are sold and card games are underway. It’s a frenetic setting for a place that once symbolised peace and tranquility.
The pagoda is not an ordinary religious work, in terms of decoration. Unlike all Vietnamese traditional pagodas which were built out of brick and wood, this pagoda is made from reinforced concrete and coated by enameled ceramic panels, making this a unique heritage.
For now all of the beams, walls, ceilings and altars are in excellent condition. The mosaic of ceramic panels depicts a number of stories about the beauty of nature and people’s daily lives and Buddhism. On the pagoda’s roof sits a large ceramic gourd said to contain a type of water used by Buddha to save all living things.
There are also panels describing various kinds of punishments dished out in hell to sinners. These striking scenes are supposed to urge people to choose good over evil.
In one sequence a senior mandarin sits at a table between two devils. Below evil-doers suffer – some are fettered and beaten, some are being beheaded, others boiled in steaming cauldrons. In another picture, the Chinese priest Xuanzang is leading a pilgrimage to India accompanied by Sun Wukong, known in the West as the Monkey King, and his fellow travellers "Pigsy" (Zhu Bajie) and "Sandy" (Sha Wujing).
Local legend
Vietnamese story called Quan am Thi Kinh is also depicted. The story goes, a woman by the name of Thi Kinh married a rich man Thien Sy.
One day, when her husband was sleeping, she noticed a hairy mole on his face so she took a pair of scissors, intending to trim his hair. When he suddenly woke, he thought she was out to kill him. He drove her out of the house and so she was cut adrift. Alone and penniless, she dressed as a man and went to live in a pagoda under the name Kinh Tam.
In the village, there was a girl called Thi Mau, who fell in love with Kinh Tam. But as the love was fated to be unrequited, she slept with a local man and became pregnant only for Kinh Tam to be accused of fathering the child.
“If she confessed that she was a girl, she would have been absolved from a beating and vindicated. But she wanted to save the baby,” explains a monk from Hung Ky pagoda. When the baby was born, Thi Mau gave the baby up to the pagoda. Kinh Tam cared for the baby and did everything she could to find milk to feed it. When she died three years later and was discovered to be a woman, she was renamed Bo Tat Kinh Tam, a Buddhist prophet of immense mercy.
History of Hung Ky
The pagoda was built between 1931 - 1934 by a man called Tran Van Thanh and his wife Vu Thi Sau. As the owner of a brick producing factory, Thanh was a rich man. However, Sau came from an impoverished background and had sold herself to survive before meeting Thanh, whose nickname was Hung Ky (Rich Man). The couple soon fell in love and were married.
As their business grew, they thought of building a pagoda in the locality, which is called Hoang Mai (Yellow Apricot). Apparently, Thanh had travelled to Marseille for a fair and his products had sold well. So when he returned with a small fortune he spent it on the construction of the pagoda.
After the site was finished, the couple wanted to hand it over to the local authorities, but due to Sau’s shady past this generous offer was rejected as it was feared that her reputation would badly affect the village’s prestige. The pagoda was originally named Vu Hung but locals preferred the name Hung Ky. Over the years the pagoda grew in popularity and today it is visited frequently by Buddhists and has been recognised as a cultural site by the municipal authorities. But everyone still has to shuffle in the side door.